My senior citizen friends and I—and even those who didn’t vote for presumptive President Digong Duterte—anxiously awaited the announcement of his priority plans for the first six months of his six-year administration.
These we heard from his Davaoeño transition team members Peter Laviña and Carlos Dominguez, who were certainly articulate.
Former Davao City Councilor Laviña started by restating the presumptive president’s campaign promises to fight drugs, criminality, corruption, and poverty.
He then proceeded to tell us that a federal form of government would be pursued via a “major rewriting” of the 1987 Constitution. This would include easing the restrictions for foreigners to own land, public utilities, and educational institutions and exploit our natural resources.
He concluded by assuring us that lasting peace in Mindanao and elsewhere in the country would be achieved through negotiations with the revolutionary Left and Muslim rebel organizations.
Former Cabinet Secretary Dominguez, for his part, revealed the presumptive president’s eight-point economic agenda which addresses taxes, infrastructure, social services, and rural development. Specifically, the current macroeconomic policy would be continued but public-private partnerships would be accelerated to create more jobs and inject economic activity in the country.
The rest of the eight-point economic agenda consisted of the usual economic objectives to attract foreign direct investments by easing economic restrictions, enhancing competitiveness of doing business, and developing the rural areas by providing support services to small farmers.
He was easier to understand, of course, when he announced that the “Davao model” would be made the standard in granting business licenses at the shortest possible time.
A few of the priority plans sounded more familiar and easily understood by us, but they did not please us.
Labor contractualization, for instance, would be banned but only starting in the undated future.
PhilHealth’s coverage would be expanded, but for what? It is now universal, and excludes no one anymore.
What PhilHealth needs is an enhancement in its support value. Even in Davao City, patients still pay out-of-pocket at least 40 percent of hospital confinement bills, and all of outpatient bills.
The unlegislated conditional cash transfer program would be indexed to inflation. What? This means that the maximum cash benefit of P1,400 per family would be increased by only P70 if inflation turns out to be 5 percent.
You would understand us, we are sure, why these priority plans have given us a nosebleed after we tried understanding and appreciating them.
The eight-point economic agenda would be formalized later by the National Economic and Development Authority into more intricate plans, complete with general objectives, specific programs and projects, measurable targets, budgets, and timetables. It might even identify the countries from where huge foreign funding would come as soft loans, assistance or technical grants.
By then, our presumptive president’s priority plans would really be above our comprehension.
Alas, nothing was mentioned about pensions. In particular, both Davaoeños missed out the P2,000 increase in pensions of the Social Security System, which the unsuccessful senatorial candidate Neri Colmenares has painstakingly filed as a bill for years.
Both Houses of Congress eventually approved it last year, but a clueless PNoy defiantly vetoed it, consistent with his refusal to increase pensions during his administration except for a token 5-percent increase.
The P2,000 increase would bankrupt the SSS by year 2029 because there were no funds for it, he said. He even pitted the 31 million active members against the two million pensioners by concluding that it would benefit only a few but jeopardize the many.
He was wrong, of course.
Bankruptcy is certain only if SSS and government do nothing but watch the pension fund deteriorate year in and year out.
The “Daang Matuwid” solution is to raise now the contributions of active workers to pay the additional pensions of the elderly, widowed and disabled, assuring them that they, too, would receive their pensions someday from the younger workers then.
Isn’t this also how new taxes are raised from city dwellers to finance the construction of roads and bridges in the countryside?
Of course, to provide adequate pensions, the inevitable solution is to apply contributions on the entire salary—and not capped at P16,000—with the workers’ contribution rate raised to equal their employers’ present rate of 7.37 percent. Total contributions would then be 14.74 percent of the entire salary.
Why are SSS pensioners crying for a P2,000 pension increase while their counterparts in the Government Service Insurance System are happily enjoying their pensions?
It is simple. Government employees contribute 9 percent of their entire salary to GSIS and their employers add 12 percent, for a total of 21 percent.
We cannot continue pretending to be blind to the obvious. Private sector workers also deserve a pension system similar to that of the GSIS, which could be immediately achieved by merging SSS with GSIS.
By the way, as we fuss on these issues, the fiduciary employees, officers and board members of our pension institutions are poised to award themselves performance bonuses again.
Do we have to wait longer before we could get that P2,000 pension increase?